yesbutisitart?

For years, I've used various film and digital cameras to record moments in time, and put into practice all the usual and what are often regarded as the ‘essential’ photography skills - composition, exposure, focus, depth-of-field, etc. But I concluded that it's not enough to simply make a record of a moment and that I wanted to move away from straightforward capture to a more abstract and hopefully artistic documentation of these moments. I started using slow shutter speeds and camera movement to blur and abstract these moments and I was pleased with the results the techniques produced. And then later it was time for another change.I was standing on a platform on the London Underground, waiting for a train home. People were rushing by, trying to get to or away from somewhere, or in some cases it seemed, delaying getting to or away from that somewhere. I wondered how I could take these everyday scenes and transform them into something less mundane, something potentially artistic. Crucially, I wanted to experiment with how quickly I could do this and not spend time re-working an image (so tempting especially with digital tools), tweaking again and again the composition, or exposure, or saturation. I wanted to do it while I was waiting to get to or from wherever I was going or had been.All the images here are made using an iPhone and various apps. The images are the final images: the originals have been deleted so it’s not possible to go back on various decisions I made: I can't go back and re-think, re-start, re-do. Each of these images is still of course a short timeframe as every photograph or image is. And although the everyday scene is still identifiable in most cases, I hope that these perhaps ordinary fractions of a second have been transformed into something more significant and that a sense of importance has been created from these moments and that it’s worthwhile revisiting the images created.